Judge’s Mentor: Part Guide, Part Foil

Sonia Sotomayor has long known José A. Cabranes, first as protégé and mentor, later as often-opposing judges.

DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

WASHINGTON — Not long after her admission to Yale Law School in early 1976, Sonia Sotomayor turned up unexpectedly at a lunch with the university’s general counsel, José A. Cabranes.

Ms. Sotomayor, a Puerto Rican student activist at Princeton, was tagging along with a friend on a research-project interview with Mr. Cabranes, then 35, perhaps the most prominent Puerto Rican lawyer in the country and later a leading contender to become the first Hispanic on the United States Supreme Court.

When the three sat down, though, Ms. Sotomayor dominated the conversation, stretching the lunch to three hours. “My poor friend,” she recalled years later in a speech honoring Mr. Cabranes, “he spent all that time listening to José and I dissect the Puerto Rican colonial spirit.”

It was the beginning of a 30-year relationship — first as protégé and mentor, later as often-opposing judges on the same court — that in many ways shaped the career that led Judge Sotomayor to her own nomination to the Supreme Court.

She has acknowledged many other mentors: a debate coach who recruited her to Princeton, a law firm partner who pushed her to seek a judgeship, a pioneering female judge who bonded with her over a shared disdain for any hint of philosophizing from the bench. Judge Cabranes, though, has played a singular variety of roles — guide, role model, patron and foil. Swearing her in to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1998, he said, “I was present at the creation.”

Taking her under his wing at Yale, he preached to her and other Hispanic students a gospel of bootstrap success and ethnic integration, encouraging them to set their sights on the highest levels. He introduced her as a friend to luminaries like the president of Yale and the secretary of state. He pulled strings to place her as a novice lawyer among prominent politicians and civic leaders on the board of a Latino civil rights group he helped found. And he passed her into the care of his own former patron, Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, whose support and connections she later said helped get her to the bench.

Evolving Bond

Judge Sotomayor has praised Judge Cabranes as a “career adviser,” a “good friend” and an “intellect,” but she has also displayed some ambivalence toward him. She has sometimes attested to his “instrumental” assistance with Mr. Morgenthau but at other times omitted the judge from her accounts of her connection to the district attorney. And her friends and former clerks say that by the time she was sworn in as a judge she was determined to distinguish herself from her former role model — at once more guarded in her style and more liberal in her thinking.

Judge Cabranes, now 68, rose through the Ivy League as a lone Hispanic in an era before widespread desegregation, student protests or affirmative action, and he carried himself as a courtly aristocrat. Judge Sotomayor, now 54, came of age in the heat of the desegregation battles, bristled at any insinuation that being a beneficiary of affirmative action tempered her qualifications and organized the growing ranks of Hispanic students to argue for more hiring and admissions.

“It is generational,” said Cesar A. Perales, the president of LatinoJustice P.R.L.D.E.F. and a friend of both. “She grew up in a time in which there was such foment within minority communities to establish their rights, right in the middle of all that, a product of the ’60s,” Mr. Perales said. “José came up before all that. He never would have been seen as a victim of discrimination.”

Where Judge Cabranes is broadly expansive in his opinions, Judge Sotomayor is studiously narrow — tailored to the facts of each dispute, avoiding “grandiose pronouncements,” as her friend Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum put it. And where Judge Cabranes’s opinions show an increasing skepticism about race-conscious civil rights policies, Judge Sotomayor has displayed broader support for such government action.

Now, those differences with her mentor are at the center of the debate over her confirmation because of Judge Cabranes’s blistering dissent from a ruling by Judge Sotomayor and two others. The ruling, currently before the Supreme Court, blocked the claim of white New Haven firefighters whose scores on a promotional exam were rejected in the interest of promoting more minorities.

Colleagues say Judges Sotomayor and Cabranes are no longer so close. She has turned more often to other judges for advice, her friends say, and she has privately criticized his rulings as too reflective of his more conservative views. Still, in an interview, Judge Cabranes said he was “distressed” that critics had seized on his dissent to attack Judge Sotomayor. The Supreme Court nomination, he said, “is the fulfillment of my hopes for her.”

Some friends, though, suggest that after watching his own name floated three times as a likely Supreme Court nominee, his pride in his protégé may be bittersweet.

“How does José Cabranes feel about her nomination?” asked Drew Ryce, a friend and classmate of Judge Sotomayor who was another Cabranes protégé. “How did Satchel Paige think of Jackie Robinson?”

Active Adviser

Ms. Sotomayor’s main focus when she arrived at Yale was “minority pursuits,” as she put it in a presentation to law school students there a few years ago. Her biggest interests were the legal status of Puerto Rico and the inclusion of Hispanics at Yale, and she gravitated to a clique of fellow minority students. If she had understood the opportunity to network more broadly, she recalled, she might have spent more time exploiting it.

Her friends from law school say they had never met anyone like Mr. Cabranes, Yale’s general counsel, the former director of the office of Puerto Rico in Washington, a founder of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund — now known as LatinoJustice P.R.L.D.E.F — and a friend of top Carter administration officials.

“He was an entirely different species of cat,” recalled Felix Lopez, whom Mr. Cabranes hired alongside Ms. Sotomayor as a research assistant.

He kept an open door to his protégés, advising them on classes, critiquing their work, and introducing them as his friends. “We were outsiders — that was our background, that was how we were perceived,” Mr. Ryce said. “José Cabranes was the first guy we found who was like us and actually inside the system, doing well, navigating it — like sailing up a difficult channel and finding a marker light.”

And Mr. Cabranes helped revise Ms. Sotomayor’s thinking about her status as an American and a Puerto Rican. She had arrived at Yale a passionate advocate of full independence for the island but under Mr. Cabranes’s tutelage, her views evolved toward a more flexible stance, and she even wrote her first law review publication — with his help, and citing his work — about the constitutional details of making Puerto Rico the 51st state.

“José helped us integrate the two parts of our identity, to be comfortable in our skin,” Mr. Lopez said.

Knowing Mr. Cabranes gave his acolytes a close-up view of the rough-and-tumble of confirmation politics. In their first year at Yale, Mr. Cabranes was named ambassador to Colombia, only to have his nomination languish as Colombian diplomats took offense at the dispatch of a Puerto Rican. (When they changed their minds, he refused to go.)

As Ms. Sotomayor finished law school, she applied for a position at the State Department. Her friends thought she might enter politics “because her commitment to reform and equality was so profound,” Mr. Lopez recalled.

Mr. Cabranes, however, pushed her toward Mr. Morgenthau’s office, assuring her that his recommendation to the district attorney meant he would become not only her employer but also her political rabbi in the New York legal world.

Even then, though, there were hints of divergence in their outlooks. Shortly before she graduated from Yale, friends say, she complained to Mr. Cabranes that a law firm partner — who happened to be a former law school classmate of Mr. Cabranes — had wondered aloud at a recruiting dinner if she was a beneficiary of affirmative action. (She has later said she was.)

Shrug it off, advised Mr. Cabranes, according to people who were close to him at the time. Ms. Sotomayor, however, filed a formal complaint, setting off a campuswide debate and national news reports.

Divergent Paths

Judge Cabranes, who joined the federal bench in 1979, has acquired a reputation as an expansive and scholarly jurist and, on civil rights matters, an increasingly conservative one. In a widely discussed 1982 case, for example, Judge Cabranes wrote an opinion for a unanimous three-judge panel supporting the an immigration officer’s decision to refuse to release eight black asylum seekers from Haiti while agreeing to release a dozen white immigrants in similar circumstances. He may have relied on “generalizations,” Mr. Cabranes reasoned in part, but that was within his discretion — an argument that infuriated many civil rights groups.

By 1991, he was reported to be top candidate for a Supreme Court nomination under a Republican, President George Bush. When President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, hinted that he was close to naming Mr. Cabranes a few years later, civil rights groups — even some Hispanic ones — made clear they were unenthusiastic.

When Ms. Sotomayor became a district court judge in 1992, their relationship had changed. “The mentee was all grown up,“ Judge Cabranes recalled.

Judge Sotomayor made clear from the start that she had no intention of emulating her former mentor, in substance or style. And she turned for advice to others on the bench, most notably Judge Cedarbaum, who became a close friend.

Before being named to the Federal District Court in Manhattan in 1986, Judge Cedarbaum had, among other things, served as a part-time village justice in Scarsdale, N.Y., settling disputes about barking dogs and fender benders.

In a sharp contrast to Judge Cabranes’s more expansive style, she and Judge Sotomayor found they agreed on a more cautious, scrupulously narrow, just-the-facts approach to judicial work, disdaining what they called “results-oriented judges” — meaning judges, including conservatives, who used elaborate ideas about democracy or constitutional interpretation to reach the ends they happened to favor.

Their shared approach is in part defensive, Judge Cedarbaum explained, to protect against future embarrassment. “When you make grandiose pronouncements on facts that are not before you, you might regret it when another set of facts comes up,” she said. “We don’t write philosophical treatises. We decide cases.”

Judge Sotomayor’s friends say she was also dismayed at Judge Cabranes’s rulings on the subject of discrimination. Reflecting her own experience, former law clerks say, she tended to view the scope of federal civil rights protections as broadly as possible within the limits of the law, said Jenny Rivera, a former law clerk for Judge Sotomayor.

Now, her colleagues say, Judge Sotomayor’s differences with Judge Cabranes are on display in the controversial decision about the New Haven firefighters, Ricci v. DeStefano.

Her conservative critics say her disagreement with Judge Cabranes in the case betrayed her liberal activism, turning a deaf ear to the claims of the white firefighters. Her supporters say the ruling merely followed precedent in affirming a lower court. Judge Guido Calabresi, another member of the court who taught her at Yale, argued in an interview that the terse ruling — an unsigned and unelaborated statement from a three-judge panel that the full circuit declined to review — also showed a cautious reluctance to open the new and thorny questions Judge Cabranes wanted to take on. “Judicial minimalism,” Judge Calabresi said.

Judge Cabranes, in an interview, said only that he considered such disagreements “the nature of appellate judging.”

Reflecting on his role in Judge Sotomayor’s career, Judge Cabranes said, “I wanted to put her on the right path, and I don’t think I was wrong.”

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